More and more, religion scholars question the usefulness of the category of “religion.†Many reject presumptions that that which “religion†signifies is unique, universal, inherently meaningful, and perhaps more importantly, self-evidently “religious." "Religion†is thus re-conceived as a modern technology in which it, as a fabricated private and non-performative domain, contains political dissent. Such arguments, however, depend upon a distinction between these two categories, the religious and the political, rather particular to North America. My project, in contrast, aims to explore these categories through an ethnography of the lives of contemporary Brazilian Christians. Shifted ever so slightly, it appears that this case would support arguments that suggest the religious is in fact encompassed by the political.
